A2Z Homeschool – Ann's Blog

Learning Happens

Posted by Ann Zeise on June 16, 2009   Category: Concerns     ·Tagged learning, Texas, typical day, unschooling.

by Holly Furgason

Without textbooks and workbooks to fill our days, people often wonder what we do all the time. More importantly, they wonder how my children learn. Our life is full of learning opportunities but my mind usually goes blank when I’m asked to give an example. Recently I decided to make a conscious effort to notice what learning was going on in our home. Here are some of my notes from the past few days:

• My girls, 6, 9 and 11 years old, made cookies. We actually do this often as well as making other foods but this time they were on their own. They needed to read and understand the recipe. They could only find a one cup measure (now they know how I feel when they loose my measuring cups outside!) and that left the girls having to estimate 1/4, 1/2 and 1/3. Quite interesting! I let them figure it out themselves and then they checked with me.

  They also wanted to experiment and make a new recipe to enter in a cookie recipe contest. We discussed why certain ingredients needed to stay in because of the jobs they did and which were unnecessary and could be changed. The cookies came out great!

• We made playdough. We do this a lot also but my 6 year old daughter wanted seven different colors and we only had four tubes of food coloring! We had so much fun mixing the different colors into the dough and changing the shades. The gel food coloring is so much brighter than the liquid coloring! She learned all about primary and secondary colors and how to mix them to get any color you need. When we were done she took a piece of cardboard and made a whole town complete with roads, cars, houses, a lake, people and animals. My favorite was the fish she put in the lake!

• We don’t watch much television and not all of it is quality but PBS had two shows, The Life of Birds and Antiques Roadshow, that really interested them. The Life of Birds obviously taught them quite a bit of science, adaptation, ecosystems, the food chain, the physics of flying, anatomy etc.

  Antiques Roadshow contains a lot of history so it’s my 14 year old son’s favorite. Each piece is shown and discussed before the appraisal price is given. His special interest is in the guns and swords but it’s amazing how much history can learned by knowing about the everyday objects that were used.

• We went to the SPCA with our homeschool group. We learned a lot about taking care of animals and what they do there but the biggest benefit was social. We also learned we don’t like large field trips. We always have so much more fun when we go informally with friends!

• On The way home from the SPCA we visited an art gallery. The girls were attracted to the bright, child like paintings done on tissue paper in a downtown gallery. We stepped inside to take a look and were able to talk with artist himself. We had a discussion on abstract art and the next time we were at the library we did some research into the subject.

• All of my children have their own email account. Even though they usually just write to friends that they see often they are gaining experience in writing and using the computer.

• My 11 year old daughter received a book of poetry by Emily Dickinson on her fifth birthday and she often reads from it. The poem she was reading to herself didn’t make sense so she brought it to me for help. We discussed how to read poems a certain way, not just line by line but sentence by sentence. Finally she read it so it made sense. She also needed to look up the “elegy” and “behooves”, words that I really didn’t know.

• We visit books stores more than we visit toy stores and on our visit this week my 14 year old son found several Civil War magazines to buy. Not only did he get information from the magazines but he got on the internet to look up some of the sites listed in them. He found catalogues for period clothing as well as listings for re-enactments and he plans to visit some. The best site of all was one he found through links that had a list of the original members of the regiment during the Civil War and it included one of his ancestors!

• My children like to choose orders from catalogues. They pick what they want, sometimes multiplying the price because more than one will want the same thing, and add it all up including tax and shipping and handling. If it’s something that they can really buy then they gather the money (sometimes they need to earn it first which is a whole different story!), fill out the order form, buy the money order and send it off.

• We often read the newspaper or listen to the news but I was surprised when someone pointed out a lady in the paper and said, “It’s Elizabeth Dole!” Without reading the caption another said that it wasn’t. They read the caption and it was Kay Bailey-Hutchinson, our Senator from Texas, who looks surprisingly like Dole. I wondered how many 9 and 11 year olds knew who Dole was, let alone what she looked like!

• We received a catalogue that sold boxes as well as other wrapping materials. The kids were all excited to think that they could buy boxes that were new! The younger ones wanted to know why each price listed had three numbers and two x’s. I explained that those told how big the box was three different ways; length, width and height which would give them the volume of the box. They brought out the tape measure to find out what size boxes they would need for various items and activities. I taught them how to find the cubic measurement of the box and we discussed why that would be important.

• My children spend a lot of time drawing and writing. I’d say this is the third most common activity in our house after singing and reading. They love to write books, illustrating them as they go along.

• The other day all three girls made flowers from paper. They then set up a “store” to sell them, divided the work, agreed to their responsibilities, decided how to price their product and how to divide the profit. My 11 year old daughter soon learned that tyrants don’t get as much work out of employees as respectful supervisors!

• We keep a laying flock of chickens, some turkeys and a goose and have had ducks and a steer in the past. They’ve watched hens actually lay eggs (they don’t sit down when they do it so you can get a good look!), chicks hatch, mother hens at work and taught a calf to drink from a bucket.

• We keep large gardens; an herb garden, a vegetable garden and some flower gardens. They all understand plants because of this. They know how plants make food, the difference between perennials and annuals, what a plant needs in the soil, how seeds are made because they help fertilize the cucumbers and squashes and quite a bit of botany.

• My husband had a karate seminar and brought a popular black belt to give workshops. The kids not only helped with mailings and registration but they also got to meet a very interesting, well traveled man. My husband has these seminars several times a year. They also study karate with their dad and help him teach the younger students for pay.

• Houston has the perfect environment for catching and collecting frogs, toads, snakes, geckos, lizards, bugs and snails. Some recent heavy rains left big puddles and the kids brought in lots of toad and snail eggs. We watched the eggs develop and then the tadpoles turn into toads. We do this several times a year.

• My girls play a word game with some of their homeschool friends where they have to think of as many words that begin with one letter as possible. To be ready for the next game they decided to write down all the words that began with the first letters of their names.
  

  1. My 5 year old practiced writing letters and learned sounds;
  2. After thinking of all the “K” words she could, my 9 year old looked up words in the dictionary;
  3. My 11 year learned how to spell new words as she wrote her list down. Just because you can say them doesn’t mean you can spell them!

• We often discuss law especially constitutional rights. It comes up often since my son is afraid to travel by himself during the day because of the city curfew. My husband was a law student and so they also have a basic grasp of torts (“FITTED CAB” for you lawyers out there), contracts and other first year subjects since my husband listened to his first year tapes in the car. But I’m not so sure this is a good thing when the kids come crying to me, “She torted me!”

• All of the kids take theater classes which is quite an education in itself. My son has participated in two plays at Miller Outdoor Theatre to audiences numbering in the thousands and they’ve all done many class shows of Broadway musicals. Because my son is available during the day he often to asked to help out with building sets, lighting, costumes and other backstage theater jobs.

  Add to all that scouts, library and museum visits, travel, church, projects, discussions, books, books and more books and the kids sharing their own interests, learning happens all the time!